Objects of Affection

There are moments of unsettling insight in this collection by Evgenia Citkowitz, such as when Jonathan, the expansively unhappy protagonist of the story, “The Bachelor’s Table,” wakes up next to his wife:

He was relieved that he felt no resentment toward her.The opposite of resentment is what?Something good.

To not have a name for something so necessary to happiness, to be so unfamiliar with an absence of resentment as to find it odd, such a life would be devastating, even unthinkable, right? But then, just what would the opposite of resentment be? It’s at once a crisis of diction and something much more serious.

In this fine story, Jonathan, like many of Citkowitz’s characters, is ambivalent about the privileges of modern American wealth: he owns houses in Sag Harbor and Los Angeles, but grumbles about the way his wife has decorated them. He drives a Range Rover, but hates its inefficiency and waste. He is a man, it seems, of taste, but mostly that manifests itself as what he doesn’t like. So what does such a man love?

Well, Jonathan loves a table, but not just any table. The one that he spots on Christmas Eve in a Sag Harbor antique shop is a “bachelor’s table,” an all-in-one writing and dining piece just like one that belonged to his father, a New York art critic whom he met just twice. Jonathan’s father had once shown him the table, and noted his son’s admiration of it, but in a final note of cruelty, did not leave it to Jonathan when he died. He left him nothing.

Jonathan buys the table for thirty-three hundred dollars—a steal, he knows—only to hear soon from the store’s owner that there had been a mistake, a misquotation of the price, which was, in fact, thirty-three thousand. By now he owns the table, and must decide whether to return it, pay the correct price, or simply keep it, as is his right. Jonathan frets about the predicament; his wife, impatient, knows the real source of his concern:

She laughed, scornfully. “Why do you do this to yourself? It’s all a colossal distraction.” “From what?” He knew what she was getting at but needed to hear her say it. “It’s pitiful that you have to ask.”

Heirlooms are often the most tangible representations of family; that they are sometimes very old and very valuable makes their meaning even more complex. There is a rich tradition of stories about disputed wills, tense estate sales, and sibling enmity, all which turn objects into ideas, with variously hilarious or tragic consequences. What makes Citkowitz’s story stand out is that Jonathan has no concrete antagonists to battle with over the table. The fight is with absence, memory, and with himself.

This story put me immediately in mind of another about familial guilt and old furniture: John Cheever’s “The Lowboy,” first published in the October 10th, 1959, issue of The New Yorker, and available to subscribers here. Though Citkowitz writes in plain, straightforward prose—almost another language compared to Cheever’s baroque, performative style—both stories examine the ways in which objects can lose their outward function and meaning and become, instead, storehouses of guilt and pain.

Cheever’s protagonist tells the story of his brother Richard—whom he describes as a “small” man in every way—and his mounting obsession with a piece of furniture:

Richard and the lowboy were united like true lovers, and, considering the possibilities of magnificence and pathos in love, it seemed tragic that he should have become infatuated with a chest of drawers.

An obsession with the lowboy slowly spoils the brother’s personality, and after a particularly troubling family dinner, the narrator returns home to smash his own inherited icons—“the green glass epergne that belonged to Aunt Mildred,” “Grandmother’s sewing box,” “the stuffed owl in the upstairs hall,”—before offering an almost giddy decree that would do Citkowitz’s Jonathan, and perhaps all of us, some good to hear:

Dismiss whatever molests us and challenges our purpose, sleeping or waking. Cleanliness and valor will be our watchwords. Nothing less will get us past the armed sentry and over the mountainous border.

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